Buffy AVP: Synthesis
by MrPointy2
Summary: The Senior Partners assemble the Alien and Predator in Sunnydale in order to test the Slayer.
1. Chapter 1

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

He hated Sunnydale. He had been transferred here only a month ago from Los Angeles and already he'd come across a string of bizarre murders like nothing he'd seen before. Officer Manning was a watch commander in his previous life. That was before the Event. For several days the sun had totally disappeared from the Los Angeles sky. Violent gangs roamed the city. Everyone had been pressed into doing patrols. One night, in a deserted and burned out part of town, he could swear he saw a thing with green skin and horns fighting alongside two regular guys against a bunch of hoodlums. Somebody got stabbed with a piece of wood. Somebody exploded in storm of dust. Later, someone had said the word v_ampire_. That was before Wolfram and Hart came sniffing around the division. Two days later he was transferred to Sunnydale.

"Who did I piss off to get assigned here?" He thought. He missed his old life. He had roots in L.A.

Officer Manning turned the steering wheel of the patrol car as he turned off onto a dark and deserted road. There was a lot of hobo activity out by the railroad yards. He would take a look at that on the way out.

Officer Manning was a lanky man that stood over six feet tall. He had a compact frame and a black goatee. His hair was cut short like most officers. He kept his gun in a holster on the seat next to him. As he passed a clump of trees he saw a man bloodied with clothing torn running in the opposite direction. The gaunt pale figure came out of the dark. His eyes were wide. Manning could see the stark fear on his face. Manning threw the car in reverse. He stopped it and leapt out. He grabbed the stranger by the arm. Before he could speak, the stranger screamed at him.

"Run!" He yelled. Manning hesitated. The strangers face turned. His eyes became yellow. Fangs appeared.

"_Vampire_!" Manning thought. He was shocked. The vampire pushed Manning away with his free arm and ran, his arms flailing about as if someone had set him on fire. Just as the stranger disappeared into the dark a burning ball of fire came out of nowhere and hit the stranger dead center. Thunder echoed in the air. The landscape lit up in red and black flames. Manning felt something behind him. He turned slowly. He eyes took a moment to focus.

About a hundred feet away the air was shimmering. Smoothing sparkled. Then _it_ appeared. The Predator stood nearly nine feet tall. It skin was mottled gold and tan. It wore standard battle armor with a silver tactical facemask. Manning didn't know what he was staring at. His eyes were giving his brain information that it refused to accept. He stood there frozen. The Predator noticed him. It turned its head to stare at the police officer. The Predator removed it's face mask. It looked like something from the bottom of the sea. It had a set of external and internal jaws. It had a third set of teeth clustered near the front that looked like vampire fangs.

Manning had left his gun in the car. It didn't make any difference. The Predator's shoulder cannon sprang to life. A ball of blue white fire shot towards him. He jumped. The blue white fire hit the squad car knocking it backwards. Flames spread along its side. The Predator roared as it pointed its arm cannon at Manning. Three red dots appeared in the center of his chest. The laser targeting system had him within its sight. Death would take him soon.

Something, dark as night, with the tail of a serpent slammed into the Predator. They both fell into the road. The Alien was on its feet first, it's tail high in the air. A little blonde girl came out of the bushes after the Alien. She had a piece of wood in her hand.

"What the …" Manning thought. Adrenaline was rushing through his body. He was running on pure instinct now.

The blonde girl moved her hands quickly gesturing to the Alien. It appeared to be under her control. The Alien quickly placed itself between the Predator and Buffy. Buffy said something in Latin. The Alien attacked again. Razor sharp claws raked across the Predators face. It yowled.

Buffy didn't wait. She rushed in with the stake to stab into the heart of the beast. But she was too slow. The Predator blocked the downward slash of the stake and punched her in the chest knocking her clear to the other side of the road. Her ribcage shattered. Bones were broken.

The Predator stood and growled. It flicked its wrist. Its wrist blades extended. A meter of razor sharp metal poked into the air, it was going to gut Buffy. As it leaned forward its chest exploded. The silicon tail of the Alien skewered the Predator. Flecks of neon green blood flew everywhere. The Predator screamed. Its deep bass voice echoed in the air.

The cop in him reacted. Manning saw Buffy attacked. He reached for the gun he had hidden. He took his 9mm Beretta and fired twelve shots. He fired until all he could hear was the hammer hitting empty air. He fired until the chamber was empty. He had hit the Predator a few times which only made it angry. Its yellow eyes looked at him with pure evil. It bared its fangs. It raised its arm cannon. Manning saw the triangle of the targeting lasers on his chest. He knew he was a dead man.

Buffy appeared from nowhere running towards him.

"Run!" Buffy screamed echoing the stranger that had come before her. "Get the hell out of here!" The Predator fired. Burning light slammed into Buffy's back. Her blouse caught fire. Manning caught her as she fell. Her weight carried them forward. They both hit the ground. The Predator moved in for the kill.

The Alien opened its mouth. Organic silicon teeth parted. Its inner mouth opened as it spit acid on the Predator. The flesh of the Predator sizzled as it ran off into the dark. The Alien perused it.

Nearly an hour later Giles arrived. He looked at Buffy and Manning lying on the ground covered in dirt and blood.

"We've got to get her to a hospital." He said.


	2. Chapter 2

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

**Before:**

They stood in the middle of a burnt out ship. Only hours ago something had fallen from the sky and crashed on the outskirts of Sunnydale. Buffy feared it may have been a queller, a creature that lived between the stars and fed on the brains of madmen. The last time she saw one an insane hell god wanted to bleed Dawn dry. But they knew the moment the arc light slammed into the ground that this was no queller. This was something new. Willow watched the object fall. She was amazed when the meteor performed several course corrections. She was shocked when it turned a right angle.

"That's a ship." Willow said. She, Buffy and Giles had assembled outside the magic shop that night to watch the falling star. When it hit beyond the horizon the sky exploded in yellow white. Seconds later, there was the sound of thunder.

Buffy found herself stepping forward pulled by some strange attraction to the falling star. Her eyes were glazed. She spoke in a soft lisp as if hypnotized.

"Something is on that ship…" Buffy said to no one in particular. Willow looked at her concerned.

"Well, yeah…" Willow said. "Ships usually have people on them. " She thought about what she had said. "Unless it's automated." She added.

"There's a vampire on that ship." Buffy said. Giles and Willow recognized the look on Buffy's face. She had already made up her mind to slay.

"Well at least let me go with you." Willow said.

"Whatever." Buffy said. Her mind was clearly elsewhere. Buffy started walking. She had her scythe out and was nearly across the street before Giles could remind her he had a car.

Now they stood in the middle of a burnt out ship shaped like a arrow set on fire. Electric neon lights and alien equipment lay trashed all around them. Buffy noticed a curved blade lying on the deck of the ship. She picked it up and examined it closely. Something once wet, something once red had dried on it. Buffy held it up for Willow to see.

"Well at least they're civilized." Buffy said.

"What leads you to believe that?" Willow answered.

"They have tools. They build spaceships they must be wise and gentle." Buffy said.

"Or disciplined and warlike." Willow thought. "The Nazis had access to cutting edge technology of their time and used it to kill millions." Willow frowned. She'd seen what evil men with machines could do. She had seen pictures of Dachau.

"Technology alone can't save you." Willow said. "It doesn't change _what_ you are."

"But what if it could?" Buffy asked. "Technology is transformative. We use it to convert wood into fire, electricity into light. You convert words on paper into magic."

Willow had no idea where this conversation was going. She was unwilling to focus on what Buffy was saying. They were in an alien spaceship for cripes sake!

"For all we know they be nothing more than galactic good old boys out on a weekend hunting trip." Willow said trying to lighten the moment.

"What's that?" Buffy thought to herself as she reached out to press a blinking button. Willow grabbed her finger just in time.

"Let's not accidently press any self destruct buttons. Ok?" Willow said. There was something about this ship that defiantly had Buffy acting loopy.

Buffy continued looking around.

"Ah ha!" She said. "I knew these aliens were civilized." Buffy said. Buffy rambled through the wreckage and pulled out papers with a plastic spine.

"If they are not civilized, then why do they have an employee handbook?" Buffy said. Willow walked over to Buffy. She looked over what Buffy had found.

"Buffy, that's a Wolfram and Hart employee hand book." Willow was dumfounded. "What was the employee handbook from the law firm that represented _most_ of the evil on Earth doing on a crashed spaceship?"

"I don't like this." Willow said. "I think this is way above our pay grades." Buffy didn't hear her. She was staring at a ten foot tall cylinder that had been shattered from the front. There were words etched on alien metal near the top of the tank.

"How do you pronounce that?" Buffy asked. Willow read the words several times before she got it.

"I think its pronounced Weyland-Yutani." She said. On the shattered broken tank was an icon etched in the metal of the curled up form of a black spiky dragon.

Willow stopped a moment to look around at the impressive array of lights and wires and metal that lay in pieces around her. "What _transformations_ does this technology hold?" Willow asked herself. She reviewed the blood covered tools that lay on the alien workbench. "Big things have small beginnings." She thought.

**NOW:**

The Predator removed it's mask and bellowed into the night. He was a dead man, he was a proud Yautja. He was part of a hunting tribe that had unleashed the fiercest warriors the galaxy had ever seen. Now he was a monster with a thirst for blood. The Predator had no idea of what he had become. All he knew was that he was lured here by the Wolf Ram and Hart with the promise of a hunt. They made him a vampire and set him loose in Sunnydale. Now the slayer was after him. Even the xenomorph they had brought with them was hunting him. He knew he should be feeling something between anger and shame. He didn't care. He didn't have a soul now. The Predator ignored the hole in his chest. As he performed a weapons inventory and swore by the honor of his father's name that he would personally kill everyone who had a hand in turning his life into a living hell. He heard something moving in the tree's overhead.

The Predator swerved and fired a string of plasma charges into the trees. The Sunnydale woods lit up in bright yellow white flames. Something _huge_ and black leapt from limb to limb. Plasma crisscrossed the trees barely missing it. The Alien was fast. He had to be. His queen had ordered him to kill.

It had no mind as Men measured such things. It didn't need one. It was all instinct and senses. It was a billion years of genetic memories made flesh and sent to taste and preserve the infinite combinations of DNA spread throughout the galaxy. It remembered being here in Sunnydale two hundred million years ago when the Old Ones walked the Earth. It moved to the song of the blood music that pulsed in its veins. It had no speech, no name. It lived in the action of death, the blood cry, the penetrating wound. It was destruction, absolute, alone. The Alien drew itself up to its full majestic height of well over eight feet. As the Predator fired it leapt towards the plasma discharge with absolutely no fear.

A young trim, well groomed man knocked on the door to the office of the new boss. There was quite a shake up recently with the rein of fire, the days of darkness, the beast and the freaking zombies eating everyone in the building. The young, happy go getter was glad those days were behind them. The future of the new and improved Wolf Ram and Hart looked very bright. He knocked on the door of his new boss's office again.

"Come in." said Angel.

The young man walked in. Actually, he just poked his head in the office.

"Hi Boss, just came by to say you're doing a bang up job!" He said. Angel rolled his eyes.

"Make sure your lips are moist before you kiss my ass." Angel said dryly.

"Sure thing!" The young man agreed. He was halfway out the door before he remembered why he came to see Angel. He poked his head back into the office.

"Ah sir." He said. "The experiment has begun. Angel looked up from his desk.

"What _experiment_?" He asked.

Ray Bradbury, RIP


	3. Chapter 3

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

"It's called the millennial review." Eve reported. She leaned across a brown overstuffed leather chair in Angel's office. She was an attractive woman. She stood about five foot ten. She had auburn brown hair and a pale complexion. "I'm sure Lilah got an email about this before your gal-pal killed her." Eve said. She knew that Cordelia Chase, under the influence of one of the Powers that Be, had murdered Lilah after the Beast had blotted out the sun.

"Every thousand years or so, the Senior Partners gather representatives of the top two warriors in the galaxy and drop them on the slayer, whoever she is."

"Why?" Angel asked tersely. He was pissed. He was just getting settled in to his new role as CEO of Wolfram and Hart. He had averted numerous apocalypses in the last week or so. He did not need this crap.

"Is Buffy in danger?" He asked.

"_Hell_, yeah. Your old girlfriend is screwed." Eve answered.

Angel hit a button on his desk. Building security came online.

"I want an ops team prepped and on the heilo pad in five minutes. Full load out, grenades plus armor piercing rounds." Angel released the button.

"That won't help." Said Eve. Everyone looked at her. The Wolfram and Hart security team was one of the best private armies in the world. They could give any SEAL team a run for their money. They were well trained, brutal and well armed. They were ruthless men who had access to any weapon imaginable. There was even a rumor that they even had small tactical nukes purchased from the soviet black market.

"It won't help." Eve said again. "The Senior Partners are looking for something they call _synthesis_. That's why they always choose three warriors and one of those warriors is _always_ a slayer."

"Thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis." Fred muttered to herself. "The basis of any college paper."

"The basis of any _philosophy_." Eve corrected.

"What do they want?" Angel asked. "Where are they going with is?"

Eve shook her head. "_Sweetie_, the Senior Partners tell me nothing. All I know is that they are old and powerful and pretty much do whatever the _hell_ they want. For all we know, this may be just _entertainment_ to them. The Romans had their gladiators.

Angel was clearly upset. He had seen the video files of both the Alien and the Predator in action. He did not like Buffy's odds. "What happens to the slayer?" Angel asked.

Eve shook her head. "The slayer _always_ _always_ dies."

"Not on my watch." Angel said.

"Do yourself a favor Angel; send the troops in first to pacify the area." Eve said. She smiled cryptically. She knew something she was not telling. "After all, you're our shiny new boss. Hate to lose you first month on the job.

"Fine. " Angel said. "We can monitor the troops from here." He pressed a button. A large flat screen monitor came out of the wall.

"Anybody got any popcorn? Gunn asked. He sat down and stared at Eve. He did not trust her. No one did.

An explosion of noise and clamor surrounded them as they burst into the emergency room. Manning lead the way. Giles was behind him with Buffy. He had met the old man and the young girl while patrolling the outskirts of Sunnydale. The girl had been fighting monsters, _freaking_ for real monsters. A doctor met them at the door. The radio in his patrol car still worked well enough for him to call ahead.

The doctor looked over the bruised and battered body of Buffy Summers. He looked up at the two men who had accompanied her. He frowned slightly. He hoped these two weren't the freaks who hurt her. The doctor pulled a curtain around Buffy's bed. He and a nurse began to examine her. Manning waited until the nurses had finished bandaging his sprained hands and ribs. With his good hand he grabbed Giles and walked him over to a quiet corner.

"What the hell is happening here?" Manning asked. "Who the hell are you? Why is that girl in there fighting monsters?

Giles looked at the police officer trying to access what to tell and what to leave out. Giles realized that that Manning had seen everything. Giles decided not to lie.

"That _girl_, as you call her, is a slayer. She is the chosen one given the speed, the strength and calling to fight the children of the Old Ones, the demons, and the vampires."

"Yeah, vampires. " Manning said. "I know about those. I was in Los Angeles when the sun went out." Manning looked at Giles. "Those things she was fighting, they were not vampires!"

"Technically, one of them was a vampire." Giles said. "They're both creatures from another planet." Manning was amazed. Buffy looked so small and fragile. Giles knew how Buffy must look to untrained eyes. Giles leaned in and whispered into Manning's ear.

"That girl is a _hunter_. She always gets her prey." Giles hissed. "We are fighting to save the world. Are you with us?" He asked then turned away. Giles made his way over to Buffy's bed. Manning watched his back as he walked away.

Giles leaned over Buffy's bed. The doctor had cleared her for visitors. Buffy was battered and bruised but she was basically ok. Giles still found Buffy a wonder to behold. On the way over, he had seen her brunt skin heal while she was in the car. Whatever it was that Buffy had become, it had jacked her healing powers through the roof.

Buffy weakly opened her eyes. She had a glazed and faraway look like she was trying to remember who and where she was. She whispered something in a dry raspy voice. Giles leaned in closer to hear her better.

"It's here." She said.

The ceiling tiles exploded downwards. Something huge and black filled the center of the room. The Alien unfurled itself to its full majestic height. Her eyes flicked open. She jumped out of bed. Buffy stood rigid facing the alien. It stood three feet over her. She stood in its shadow. Buffy placed the palm of her hand on the side of it. The alien was a warm living thing. She could feel it purring through its skin.

Buffy was not Buffy. Her name was Hive. She was the group mind of the alien species. The magics had changed her. She was a queen now. The telepathic bond between them tied them together in a deep ocean of race memory. They were one. The question of where Buffy ended and the Alien began was meaningless. It was like asking where the mind ended and the body began. Buffy held the Alien completely in her thrall.

"Remember what I said about her being a hunter?" Giles said to Manning. "Well, that's her dog."

On the other side of the room someone dropped a bed pan. It made a loud clang as it hit the floor. The alien turned. Its second set of jaws extended. Knees flexed to jump. Buffy stepped in front of it.

"Down boy." She said. The alien faltered. It hesitated a moment before it obeyed her.

"Buffy." Giles asked.

"Yes." Buffy answered never taking her eyes off the Alien.

"What do we do when the glamour wears off" They both knew the answer was not good.


	4. Chapter 4

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

The modified AH-64A apache helicopter flew over the Sunnydale landscape as quietly as the fall of night. The four people aboard it, Janskey, Leonard, Catherine, and Remy, were all Wolfram and Hart security officers. They had all worked as mercenaries in their previous lives. Leonard and Catherine got their experience in South Africa; Leonard was trained to fight in Afghanistan. No one knew anything about Remy. All they knew was that he had a lot of experience fighting vampires. Janskey was the pilot. He was looking for a place to land. Catherine worked the equipment given to them by Wolfram and Hart. She used it to locate and track the Predator they had been sent to kill. Their tactical briefing had been quite clear. Locate and neutralize the Predator without alerting the public or the _slayer_. Remy found it funny they had been sent to protect the bosses' old girlfriend.

"Hey Kat, you through playing with your box?" Remy said. Catherine looked up. She was still trying to get a solid read on the Predator's position.

"Eat me." She said. Catherine grinned like a wolf. If she needed too, she could be as foul mouth as any of the guys. The console made a brief beeping sound. Catherine tapped the screen.

"Got you, bastard." She said. "Find a spot to two clicks east of here. That's where we're find our boy." Catherine tapped the back of the pilot seat with her fist. "We are on" she said with excitement.

"I hear that." Leonard said.

The helicopter set down quietly in an open field next to a major expanse of woods. They spread out. Remy scanned the woods around him. He had point. He'd heard the Predator liked to watch from the trees. The light from the helicopter formed a small pool of light. They moved away from that light into the darkness.

"I got movement!" Remy yelled excitedly. Catherine rolled her eyes.

"Stealth much?" She said as sarcastically as possible. "Don't tell me this is your first monster hunt?"

Remy ignored her. He scanned again then stopped cold. Remy slowly looked up. They could see the shimmering outlines of the Predator's invisible form.

"Open fire!" He yelled. They opened fire. Remy poured over a thousand rounds per second into the Predator from his modified AK-113. His team mates followed. Over ten thousand rounds per second poured into the Predator. Bits of his flesh exploded outwards. His wounds healed almost as fast as they were made.

"Sunlight!" Remy screamed as he hit the grenade launcher. Everyone blinked. The polarized contact lenses each had installed clicked into place. The grenade exploded producing a tiny star ten times brighter than the noon day sun.

"There!" Angel said as he pointed to the screen. Geosynchronous satellites permanently hovering over Sunnydale showed a bright flair that momentary turned the screen white. His war against the Predator could be seen from orbit.

"Not so much." Eve said to herself.

"He's not dead!" Remy said. He was amazed. The Predator had already healed. "Flame throwers, now!" He screamed.

Reddish orange flames hit the Predator. Its body caught fire. It didn't make any difference.

"What the _fuck_ is this?" Leonard said as he fired hundreds of tiny stakes per second into the Predator. Its bright burning form leapt upon him and gutted him with one stroke. Still on fire, the Predator jabbed into Leonard and tore his spine out and held it high in the air. Pieces of him hung off the meter long wrist knife.

The night sky lit again. Catherine launched two more daylight spectrum grenades. This was no longer a covert mission. This was the kill or be killed scenario. She began to understand just how little her bosses at Wolfram and Hart understood what it was they were dealing with. A red triangle appeared on her forehead. She didn't notice it. A single plasma burst exploded from the Predator. It struck Catherine. Her head exploded.

Charred chunks of her were still in the air as the Predator began to scan his surroundings for someone else to kill. The Predator was in full homicide mode. He could tell by their smell that these men were with Wolfram and Hart. He heard something in the bushes. The Predator stood. He switched to infrared. In the pitch blackness he saw streaks of green and the slight red glow of someone's body heat.

Something sharp and hard came down across the back of his head. Remy still held the edge of the dual edge battle axe as the Predator turned his head towards him.

"Say goodnight demon." Remy said in his thick Louisiana accent. The Predator hit a button on his electronics. A highly stylized computer voice played back the last sound it recorded.

"_Goodnight demon_." It said. The Predator whipped its fist to fast to follow and slammed it into Remy's chest breaking through his ribs smashing his heart. Remy's eyes rolled back. The Predator pulled his bloody arm out of the body.

"_Oh shit_!" Janskey thought as he cowered in the bushes. He tried to remain very still. He had just watched his team mates die. He shifted slightly in the bushes. His palm came down upon a twig. He heard it snap.

The Predators head turned. It had heard something in the dark. It scanned the woods in infrared. He saw his target. Janskey took his shot. He leapt out of the bushes with twin .45 cal glocks blazing. The bullets went cleanly through the Predator. In four steps the Predator was upon him. It grabbed him by the throat and sunk his teeth into his neck. The Predator drained Janskey in less than two seconds. He dropped the body and bellowed into the night.

This was his challenge to the Wolf Ram and Hart: "After thousands of years I am undefeated. I dare you to come for me!" The Predator went to tear apart the helicopter with his bare hands.

"What was _that_?" Angel asked.

"_That _is the problem." Eve responded. "That hunter is _old_. We have no idea what it is. We have been trying to kill this thing for thousands years. It's not your typical vampire." Angel mulled over the information for the longest. He did not like Buffy's odds.

"What about the other one?" Angel asked. "What purpose does it serve?"

"It." Eve said as she flicked a switch that brought a high definition image of the Alien on the huge flat screen. "It is a gift from one of our clients, _Weyland-Yutani_. It is the member of the _only _species that has ever gone head to head with the Predator and survived."

Angel considered his options. "Until we can think of something better, we're going to have to leave it to Buffy. Everyone agreed. Eve was strangely silent. She still had her secrets.


	5. Chapter 5

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

Eve sat in her office. The last week or so had been a real pain. Angel and crew had come dangerously close to understanding what she was trying to do here. As usual, she was able to steer them away from any important truths. She looked at the paper that had started all of this for her.

"_On the creation and deployment of spiritual forces as an emerging property of natural selection_" the title of the paper read. It was her graduate thesis. It was the paper that got her hired by Wolfram and Hart straight out of Berkley U.C. They had been running a project with several points from her paper for the last ten thousand years. The Senior Partner s knew a millennial review was on the way. They wanted her to oversee it. This was one of the many side projects she ran for the Senior Partners right under Angel's nose.

"If Angel knew what I was up to, he would kill me on the spot." She thought. Eve opened a second file. It had a picture of the man who was her eyes on the ground. She had managed to get Manning transferred to Sunnydale after the rein of darkness caused by the Beast.

"Poor idiot doesn't know who he's really working for." She thought. "The innocent make the best sleeper agents."

Eve understood very well the forces she was dealing with. A slayer was basically a possessed woman. The Dark Men, then the Watchers had managed to domesticate the slayer over thousands of years. This gave them a power to fight the forces the Senior Partners unleashed on Earth. Now the Senior Partners were scheming to take that power away. If they could find a way to transfer the power of the Slayer to another species then they would be unstoppable.

"Predator, Alien, Slayer, Synthesis." Eve thought. She imagined a Xenomorph with the power of a slayer.

"Silicon skin, acid for blood,fearless,ruthless,totally without mercy." The thought of it gave her goose bumps. The power she imagined it would possess made her slightly aroused.

She saw the cell phone video sent by her agents from the hospital where the Xenomorph had shown itself. She watched Buffy walk up to it and stroke it like it was her pet.

"Good work Summers." Eve though. "You have no idea how close you are to synthesis." Buffy had achieved something the Senior Partners hadn't in over ten thousand years. She had a symbiotic relationship with the Alien. That was the first step to synthesis.

Eve pushed herself away from her desk. She leaned back letting her thought roam free. She smiled as she imagined unleashing the alien slayer against Angel.

"Happy days." She murmured.

She never got used to her hands. They were so small and pink. Buffy constantly examined herself. Her body felt all wrong. She was small and soft and had only one mouth. She should be bigger and darker with skin made of polymerized silicon and no matter where she looked on her body she had no idea what she was going to use to lay her eggs.

She snapped out of it.

"Dammnit I'm Buffy. Earth Buffy and I will not be laying eggs." She thought to herself. Giles looked at her. He knew Buffy was having issues adjusting to the alien memories. They both looked at each other for a moment. They had managed to leave the hospital and steal a hummer from the parking lot. The terrible price paid for allowing Buffy access to alien memories haunted them still.

**Before:**

Seven demons lay dead. They had been killed by something powerful, something new. Buffy had been tracking it for days after the strange ship had fallen from the sky. Willow bent over the body of the latest kill. A rubbery thing with too many arms had a hole in its chest like something had burst out of it. The thing that did lay beside it. It was dead as well. Willow examined its cell structure.

"It's like it tried to combine with the demon but failed. Whatever this alien is.." Willow said as she teased the dead chest buster with her scalpel. "It only works with humans or something close enough to human."

Buffy looked at Willow strangely. Willow could tell that her mind was far away. Buffy continued to stare at Willow without blinking. It was if she was listening to instructions from far away.

"We need to get inside of its head." Buffy said. "We need to understand how the alien thinks."

"How it thinks?" Willow said. "How can it think? It's just an animal."

Buffy looked at her as if she'd said the strangest thing she had ever heard.

"We're going to need the Janus bust." Buffy said. "and the magics of Ethan Rayne."

Willow sat her scalpel down and lifted her goggles. "I thought magic was my thing?" She said. "Am I supposed to start slaying now?"

"You can't." Buffy said in a deadpan tone. "Your arms are too flabby."

Two days later they had what they needed. Giles had taken the Janus bust out of storage. Ethan Rayne had used it to make the expectations of a fetish object real. Xander had become a solider because he wore a soldier's uniform. Buffy had become a 17th century maiden because she wore the outfit of a 17th century woman. Willow even became a sexy ghost.

Willow had sprinkled Buffy's blood over the body of the dead chest buster. Giles chanted the spell. Worked the sacred objects in the circle. There was a pop and a soft purple yellow light. Buffy felt the walls of the world flee into darkness. She felt like she was falling down a black well. Suddenly sounds and smells came upon her.

She was on Earth two billion years ago. The Old Ones were everywhere. Something that looked like a red and gold jellyfish floated above her. It sent out sparks of electric waves that made the sky undulate in insensate lust. The room flashed. Lightening lit her brain. She was with her Hive in the Beta Hydri solar system twenty four light years from Earth. She stood with thousands of her mates and her children. She ran with them as they stampeded in their attack on the strange invaders that had come to their world. She remembered the joy of tearing into their soft pink flesh.

Buffy opened her eyes. She saw Willow. There were monsters in the Hive! Buffy growled and leapt upon Willow. Her fingernails, normally sharp enough to tear into steel, could only scratch at Willow's flesh. Buffy opened her mouth and tore into Willow with her teeth.

Later, much later, when Giles had been able to talk her down he performed the second part of the spell. Giles created a simple glamour that made Buffy look like a queen to the alien. They buried Willow the next day.

**Now:**

"If we don't succeed Giles. I don't think I can forgive myself." Buffy said. They drove on in silence.


	6. Chapter 6

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

He wondered what he had stepped into. Manning watched Giles and the young blonde girl from the back seat. He knew what it was between them. As shift commander in Los Angeles he had commanded men in the field. He felt the same kind of vibe between Giles and Buffy. Those two were fighting a war and he had stepped right smack dab into the middle of it. He found that disturbing. But something else bothered him greater.

There was a big black freaking _alien_ in the cargo space behind him.

Manning knew that Sunnydale was basically a one cop town, so he could sit on this for a while. But at some point he would have to assert himself as a police officer. As if reading his mind, Buffy turned and looked back at him. There was a pained look on her face. For a moment she didn't look quite human. For a moment, Buffy looked to him like she was fighting a losing battle to hang on to her humanity.

"Are you with us?" She asked flatly. Buffy knew the battle ahead. She didn't want a civilian getting in her way. "We are going to commit severe acts of violence."

Manning kept his freaking out to a minimum. He'd had seen a lot stranger things in L.A during the reign of darkness. He'd had actually seen _vampires_!

"You know, I thought Sunnydale would be a nice quiet little town after L.A." He said. "The people at Wolfram and Hart told me…"

At the mention of Wolfram and Hart both Buffy and Giles looked at each other. Buffy slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand.

"I don't believe we missed that!" She said. Giles slammed on the brakes. The Hummer skidded then came to a stop.

"Get out." Giles said. There was an undertone of hostility to his voice. Behind Manning, the alien stirred.

"Listen to me!" Manning said desperately. Between the girl, the old man and the monster he knew he was in no position do demand anything. He hoped they would listen to him.

"I had a life you know." He said. "Then _they_ came. _Something_ was said to somebody. Next thing I know I'm being shipped off to this one horse town full of monsters. "Manning was animate. "_I had a life! _Now I'm stuck here with grandpa and wonder girl in something that scares the hell out of me. " Manning wet his lips. He was choosing his next words carefully.

"I need to do _something_. I need to get back at those bastards." Manning said, "I need to make Wolfram and Hart pay."

For a brief moment Buffy and Giles looked at each other. An unspoken conversation flowed between them.

"Congratulations." Buffy said with a sly smile. "You just made the team."

"And I am no one's grandfather." Giles added. Buffy could imagine him polishing his glasses.

"Sure thing pops." Manning thought to himself. Giles started the Hummer. They continued into the dark. All the while Buffy felt insistent memories crawling along the back of her mind demanding to be heard.

"Hello, Eve." Angel said. Eve turned. The vampire had snuck up on her. He had Gunn with him.

"I told the Senior Partners we needed to put a bell on him." She thought. Angel had caught her. She was with the corporate mystics guiding them in their control of Buffy.

"So, whatta doing Eve?" Angel asked rhetorically. He knew damn well what Eve was up to. He had spies of his own.

Gunn eyed the set up of crystals next to the mystics and the small scrap of cloth with blood on it.

"Looks like a little blood magic to me." Gunn said. He had actually never seen it being performed before. But he had heard enough about it on the streets.

"Who are you trying to control?" Angel asked.

That was the clue Eve needed. "He doesn't know the details." She thought. This gave her the wiggle room she needed.

"This is just a calibration set up." She said. "Nothing to see here boss." Eve smiled.  
"Really?" Angel said deadpan. "And how does the Slayer feel about this _calibration_ set-up?" An awkward moment passed between them. Angel lunged towards the blood crystals. Eve moved to block him. Angel was a old vampire with superhuman strength. He was shocked when Eve grabbed his wrist stopping his hand cold and slamming the palm of her hand into his face knocking him backwards. She smiled her sunny little smile showing her sharp diamond laced teeth.

"Yeah, I'm a lot stronger than I look. A perk of being a liaison to the Senior Partners. " She said. Angel didn't care. He had enough of Eve sneaking around. He had to show her who was really in charge here. He reached out to grab her. Eve stepped forward and drove her hands between his. She exhaled flooding her bloodstream with oxygen. Both of her hands slammed into Angel's chest knocking his backwards.

"Nice move." Said Gunn. He was standing next to the crystals. Eve yelled. She made a noise like a angry animal. Eve lunged at Gunn. She slammed into him knocking him and crystals over. They shattered as they hit the floor.

"Now you've done it." Eve thought. Buffy was near synthesis and off the company leash. Eve grabbed shards of the crystals off the floor. She marched up to Angel and waived the pieces in his face.

"You idiot! You have no idea how things just got a trillion times worst!" She screamed at him.

"I run Wolfram and Hart." Angel said.

"You run _this branch_ of Wolfram and Hart." Eve corrected. "We subcontract for other branches all the time." Eve said. "Those crystals were from a small planet orbiting a red giant on the other side of the galaxy. Do you know the frick'n _shipping_ costs? All project costs are refundable! Accounting will have you eviscerated! "

"Seriously Eve." Angel said as he stood gathering the last shreds of his dignity. "How bad can it get?"

Buffy felt a chain in her mind shatter. She was free. The Alien within sprang forth. Buffy went away. She was now fully Hive. She looked at the men and hissed. Buffy opened the Hummer door and jumped out. Her body rolled. She bounced to her feet and ran off into the darkness. The Alien behind Manning awoke and tore itself out of the vehicle. Giles slammed on the brakes. The monster chased after its queen. They both disappeared into the night.

Manning watched them both disappear. "I just hope I don't have to end up shooting her." He thought.


	7. Chapter 7

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

Three Turok-Han came out of nowhere. They surrounded the slayer and her Alien. Buffy didn't care about her war with the First. If she had enough of these Aliens she could take on the Turok-Han without all those silly Potentials. The Turok-Han hissed as they approached. They didn't know what to make of the Alien. They ignored it. They were under orders to kill the slayer.

Buffy reached around to her back and pulled Mr. Pointy from her waistband. She never left home without it. Buffy hissed something to the alien. They separated enough to free each other for battle. The Alien hissed back. Buffy understood. She pulled an image from their race memory and transmitted it. The alien was surprised that vampires still existed. This was not the first time the two species had met.

Buffy was not surprised that the Aliens had met vampires before. They were an old species. This was not the first time the Aliens had been on Earth. In her mind, Buffy saw something huge and purple floating in mid-air. It was an Old One. Around it were tens of thousands of Aliens. Yellow-white light flowed between the Aliens and the huge floating creature.

"They are called the children of the shadow." A voice said in Buffy's head. "This is their true name. The Aliens are the children of the Old Ones." Buffy understood. The Alien species was _billions_ of years old.

Buffy didn't care. All she could think about was killing the Turok-Han that lay between her and her target.

A Turok-Han lunged towards Buffy. She grabbed it by the arm as its momentum carried it forward. She balanced the Turok-Han across her hips and slammed it to the ground in a precise judo flip. The Alien placed itself in a protective position between the second Turok-Han and its queen. The Alien didn't wait for orders. It knew all about the Turok-Han. Rigid fingers hard as steel punched into the Turok-Han's throat. The Turok-Han stopped in mid step its eyes wide with surprise. The alien pulled its hand back then sliced across the Turok-Han's throat. Its head came off. Its body exploded in a cloud of brown dirt.

Buffy resisted the urge to stab into the Turok-Han with her second mouth primarily because she didn't have one. It was confusing being human. She had to remember what tools she had. She remembered the stake she held in her hand. She stabbed it into the Turok-Han aiming at its heart. The stake hit something hard. The Turok-Han heart was behind a wall of bone. This was an evolutionary advantage missing in modern vampires. The Turok-Han grabbed the stake pushing against Buffy. It was trying to keep the stake from entering its heart. The Alien within her screeched in frustration. Buffy released one hand from the stake, balled it into a fist and punched the Turok-Han in the mouth shattering its fangs. It howled. Buffy ignored the pain. She leaned on the stake with all of her body weight shoving it into the heart of the beast. The Turok-Han exploded in a cloud of dust. She wiped her hands as she stood. Buffy and the alien focused on the remaining Turok-Han.

It wasn't afraid. It was too vicious for that. It could barely contain its desire to inflict pain. The Turok-Han were the vampire the vampires feared. They were stronger, faster and meaner than modern day vampires. They were a primal evil. The alien regarded it with its version of contempt. It had a clear genetic memory of the history of the Turok-Han. The Alien was not impressed. Before Buffy could issue any orders the Alien jumped. It pinned the Turok-Han to the ground. Something wet, pink and slimy came out of its mouth. The Alien inserted its ovipositor into the mouth of the Turok-Han and laid its eggs. It released the Turok-Han. Buffy looked at it without emotion. She then looked at the alien. An understanding passed between them. Suddenly, the alien grabbed the Turok-Han and dragged it kicking and screaming to a nearby tree. Within minutes the alien had the Turok-Han pinned to the tree in a cocoon made from a resin secreted from its body.

The alien returned to Buffy. They continued their hunt for the Predator.

"_Exactly_ how bad is it?" Angel asked. He had caught Eve performing a type of blood magic on the slayer controlling her behavior. She claimed it was all part of the millennial review. She claimed it was the only way to keep Buffy from becoming a threat to the plans of the Senior Partners.

Angel nursed his wounds as he washed some of the blood off of his battle axe. Eve wasn't exaggerating. When accounting found out that he was responsible for breaking very _expensive_ crystals that opened the branch to _huge_ liabilities they actually tried to eviscerate him. He, Gunn and Eve fought their way back to his office. Currently, a pitched battle raged between accounting and building security.

Angel sat at his desk. He was tired and he ached. The bean counters in accounting had fought like mad men.

"So Eve." He asked. "Exactly how bad is it?"

Eve looked at Angel's desktop for a moment. She was trying to figure out a way to explain astrophysics to a monkey. The millennial review sat at the center of forces that sent repercussions throughout the galaxy.

"I mean it's just Buffy and couple of aliens." Angel said.

"You don't get it." Eve shrieked as she pounded the desk. "These Predators are insistent warmongers. They wake up in the morning looking for something to kill. They don't do anything else! They don't waste their time with poetry or art or profit. They are very good at what they do because it's all they do. They have weapons that could wipe out the Senior Partners and, oh yeah, a nice chunk of the galaxy. They have particle weapons powered by black holes the size of solar systems. These are major players Angel and they are watching."

Angel looked puzzled. It took Eve a moment to understand.

"A fleet of Predator ships are above Sunnydale right now. They are monitoring everything. "Eve stood and leaned into Angel.

"If this goes bad, the Predators won't hesitate to incinerate this entire planet." Eve said to him. Angel understood that things were now a trillion times worst.


	8. Chapter 8

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

It was the big playground. The Yaujta home world sat in a solar system with over fifteen life bearing planets. The hunting here was good. There were worlds where game flew and swam and ran strong in herds numbering in the thousands. The Yaujta stalked them all. At first it was done for knowledge. They had a golden age of exploration that lasted for hundreds of years. The Yaujta scientists had a full and complete understanding of all the life found on the many worlds. Their society was governed by progress and enlightenment. Then everything changed.

Explorers began returning from the game worlds different. They began to hunt the hunters. The returning Yaujta came to dominate the politics and economics of the home world. A class system grew. Those at the top held long pedigrees of successful hunts. Those at the bottom had none and no access to food, mates or medical services. It became the favorite sport of the powerful to hunt the poor. The Yaujta were well on their way to self destruction. They were saved almost by accident.

Pack commander Barik Null had been tracking the prey for days. He had first noticed stray electromagnetic readings on his way to his annual hunt on one of the distant jungle worlds. At first he thought it was the product of a solar flare, but then the signal turned a right angle as it moved towards the Home world. That's when he knew it was a ship. He slipped into stealth mode rendering his ship invisible as he started the track. Barik grunted in surprise as he came close enough to the ship to know that it was not Yaujta. This was the fabled first contact. He began to hunt the alien.

Among the Yaujta great hunts gave great rewards. A hunt was graded by degree of difficulty and novelty. This was first contact. He would be the first to hunt this new species. The alien ship was nearly five kilometers across. It was an asteroid that was hollowed out and propelled by magic. Carved in runes hundreds of meters high was the true name of the ship written in the ancient language of the Senior Partners. They had come this way as part of a survey of life forms to enslave.

Barik knew none of this. He launched himself from his ship in stealth mode and fell towards the aliens at well over a thousand kilometers per second. Inertial damping technology kicked in a few hundred meters above the rocky surface of the alien ship. Barik found an airlock and quickly made his way inside.

He was dumbstruck. The inside of the ship was like nothing he had seen before. The ship was completely hollow. He stared out over an open landscape of well over one hundred cubic kilometers. In the center of the vast space was a swirling black pin wheel streaked with a vibrant red smear as if the blood of worlds had been used to paint it. Sprinkled around the maw were clumps of silver lights.

Barik found his first prey. He spotted something that looked like a mound of yellow rock with bluish grey tentacles. Meter long metallic claws extended from his wrist. He leapt upon the prey. That's when the Senior Partner turned and flicked razor sharp sparks of energy from the tips of its tentacles. The energy exploded through the Predator killing him instantly. The Senior Partner stood over the body of the alien. It took a lot of courage and skill for the creature to enter their ship and attempt to attack it. The Senior Partner had an idea. Across the galaxy, on Earth, an ancient enemy had begun to attach itself to the female of an emerging species. The Senior Partners needed pawns in the long game. These females, these _slayers_, would not hunt the living. They hunted the dead and the unnatural.

The Senior Partners knew the old magics. Several of them gathered around the fallen predator. They would resurrect it as something the slayer would hunt. They would use it to gauge the slayers power.

The ship shook. They were being attacked by a fleet of Predator ships. The Senior Partners disabled the attacking fleet with a simple use of their magics. Still the Predators attacked. Thousands of ships slammed into the asteroid in a kamikaze run. They were being hunted by the entire Predator race.

It had been the pattern of the Senior Partners to simply destroy anything that got in their way. But they needed the evil contained in life to fuel their plans. They could not profit by the large scale destruction of the very life forms they helped create. The Senior Partners knew that the control of worlds lay in the laws of worlds. They attempted to negotiate with the Predators.

The image of pack Admiral Maurivk Sarin filled the large monitor in the command center. His voice was gruff, harsh and demanding. The Senior Partners knew the seriousness of these negotiations. They knew the predators would never stop hunting them if they broke their word.

"We promise that the hunter Barik Null will have an honorable and profitable hunt in the afterlife and we will show you a new hunting ground, a planet called Earth. We will expand your game." The captain of the Senior Partners said. The Predators believed him. The contracts were signed. That was over ten thousand years ago.

Barik Null cleaned his weapons as he waited for the Slayer to arrive. Perhaps then the Senior Partners would let him rest in peace. He polished his meter long metallic claws and waited patiently for the end of the long hunt.

"Politics." Eve said still trying to explain the current situation to Angel. "It's all about politics."


	9. Chapter 9

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

Giles wondered how they were going to make it out alive this time. In the years that he had known the slayer they had been through numerous scrapes, first with the Master, then Angelus, then Faith, then Glory, then Adam now they were up against the First evil and his hordes of bringers. They had managed to get out of everything alive so far. But this was different. They were up against _aliens_ this time. Giles didn't know if the rules applied here. The slayer was a tool developed to fight the supernatural. From what he had seen the alien she hunted was something like a vampire but in a lot of ways it was not. It had an impressive industrial base and a arsenal of killing weapons that made Giles jealous. Most vampires were no better than animals. They loved the chase and the kill above all else. They mimicked human behavior because they were influenced by the flesh they wore. No vampire he had ever met had the skills and the patience to actually build a spaceship and fly to another world. The implications hit Giles like a ton of bricks.

"Wolfram and Hart brought it here." Giles said out loud. Manning looked at him from the passenger seat. After Buffy jumped out of the Hummer, Manning moved up to the front seat. Giles had access to the remaining pieces of the library of the watchers council. He had read the long journals. The long journals were summations of watcher's journals since the first slayer. It spoke of the "hunter in the dark", a being that showed itself once every thousand years for the express purpose of killing slayers. It was a particularly vicious creature and it was armed with advanced technology. Giles remembered the night Buffy had first encountered it.

The night Buffy was sitting in a chair on the back porch. The night air was warm. The stars were out. Only yesterday she and Willow had gone to investigate a crashed alien ship. So far no one had come looking for it, not the Army or the police or anybody which was weird.

Buffy sat in a chair on the back porch taking a break from the Potentials. It was like living in the world's weirdest sorority house. There was always talk of monsters and vampires and constant hand to hand training. She came outside to get a break from them.

Dawn found her. She had been looking for Buffy for a while. Dawn opened the kitchen door leading to the porch. As Buffy turned her head to speak to Dawn she saw something in the trees. For the briefest moment she could swear she saw a shape where there was nothing. There was something strange about the way the limbs bent and the leaves fluttered around a spot that should be empty that made her brain spark to full alert.

"Get back in the house now." Buffy said to Dawn not taking her eyes off the trees. Dawn furrowed her brow. She was sick of being ordered around by Buffy and tolerating a bunch of strange girls in her house touching her stuff. She was about to say "You're not the boss of me!" when a red and white ball of fire came out of nowhere. Buffy dove towards the ground. Dawn dove backwards towards the kitchen floor. The fire ball hit the side of the house exploding shards of wood and copper pipe. There was the strong smell of smoke and gas. Dawn looked up. The side of the house was gone, the edges of the remaining wall was on fire. Dawn spotted Buffy laying in the yard covered in shrapnel. A blood red triangle appeared on the back of Buffy's head. Dawn had seen enough Schwarzenegger movies on the late night tv to know a laser sighting system when she sees one.

"Gun!" Dawn screamed. Buffy rolled away from the house. The ground exploded in palm size puffs as the Predator strafed the spot where she had been. Buffy was up and on her feet in a split second. Adrenaline raced through her. She still had her invisible assailant in sight. She pulled Mr. Pointy from her waist ban and flicked it into the trees. The stake was her all purpose weapon. Not surprisingly, most things died when stabbed. Mr. Pointy flew across the yard too fast to follow. It slammed into the Predator. Luminous green blood splattered in the air. The Predator pulled Mr. Pointy out of its chest and dropped it to the ground below. It was covered in glowing green blood. Still invisible, the Predator jumped down from the tree and ran into the darkness.

"What the hell was that?" Buffy asked.

"It's not a vampire!" Giles said. Manning jumped. "It's a blood zombie!" Giles was animate now. Manning understood nothing he was saying.

"Everything she will try will be wrong. " Giles looked at Manning. He was trying to make it clear just how important his conclusion was. "The predator that Buffy is hunting is not a vampire at all. It's a blood zombie. It's not a possessed corpse it's a reanimated corpse."

"So?" said Manning. "The undead is the undead." Giles looked at him as if he was an idiot.

"A vampire is a corpse that is possessed. It is only animated by the sprit that possesses it." Giles said. Manning nodded that he understood.

"A blood zombie is purely animated by magic, damn powerful magic." Giles said. "A blood zombie is created by bypassing the carrier wave of possession and employing the pure magics of animation."

"What's the difference?" Manning asked.

"Simple." said Giles. "A blood zombie can't die. It can't be destroyed. It is the life force itself. This Predator is held together by magic not possession."

"Which means?" Manning said.

"Which means that Buffy is walking into a trap." Giles said. "She's going to die."


	10. Chapter 10

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

They pulled into a clearing in the woods. Giles killed the engine. As the noise from the engine died, they both looked around the mist covered field for any sign of Buffy or the Predator. Manning checked his gun. They had stopped by the police station to reload. Manning had picked up a couple of boxes of hollow point armor piercing bullets. He wanted to be able to go toe to toe with the Predator. He didn't believe what Giles said about it being an unkillable blood zombie. It was his experience that if you shoot something enough times it dies.

"Where's the slayer?" Manning asked. He hoped that he'd used the terminology correctly. He had to listen in silence to Giles going on and one about the one girl in the world with the speed and strength to fight the living dead. Giles told him all about the adventures of the scoobies and the events surrounding Willow, angel and Spike. Manning could swear the old man liked to talk on and on about the slayer. He babbled on like a proud father. Manning had to interrupt him on several occasions.

"Yes, yes, Buffy is the bane of monsters everywhere. But didn't she sleep with a vampire once?" He'd asked. Giles looked at him with irritation.

"She's only human…" Giles said.

"That's what worries me." Manning replied. "Now your little girl has a alien monster to play with. What is she going to do now?"

Giles frowned for a long time. He resisted the urge to clean his glasses. When he regained his composure he spoke to Manning in a stark commanding voice.

"Buffy is _no one's_ little girl. She has saved the world multiple times and _died_ twice doing so. I suggest you speak of her with respect." Manning took the hint. Still, as they sat in the car waiting for Buffy to arrive his mind swirled with questions. He didn't care how Giles reacted.

"So." Manning said. "When all this is over, what are you going to do with Buffy now that she'd killed her best friend?" Giles had no answer.

**Eve is worried. This is how things can go really, really bad.**

Eve knew what she had to do next. She had been watching Buffy for years. She knew what Buffy was capable of. Wolfram and Hart had files on the slayers going back for thousands of years. They knew more about the slayers than the watchers.

After the events with the government project known as the Initiative she stepped up her monitoring of Buffy. She had both the magic shop and Buffy's house bugged. Eve let her finger rest above the "F4" key of her computer as she stared at a freeze frame of an encrypted video file she'd had pulled from the Wolfram ad Hart servers. On her screen was a high resolution image of Willow Rosenberg.

"She's the dangerous one." Eve thought. She knew that Willow was the key to Buffy defeating Adam. She was still lost on the details. She didn't know how Buffy managed to gain control over the Alien. She knew that Buffy and Giles had used the Janus Bust and glamour to make Buffy appear as a Queen to the Alien. Hell, she was a Queen! But she was still a slayer. She was both an alien and a slayer.

"What is this synthesis the Senior Partners are looking for?" Eve thought. "Then she remembered. The slayer is not just a soldier in the front lines of a nightly war. The slayer is an avatar of a force beyond comprehension. Her fingertips flew over the keyboard. Certain sequences of keystrokes rerouted data directly to the senior partners who watched developments in Sunnydale anxiously. Minutes later she had her response. She tapped the side of the computer. A second, smaller keyboard appeared. Eve entered the codes. Hundreds of miles away and hundreds of feet beneath Sunnydale warheads armed themselves. The Senior Partners had given their permission to deploy the atomics.

"We've got movement!" Manning said. He elbowed Giles. A hundred yards away in the darkness there was a dim glint of metal.

"Looks like our boy's here." Manning said. He checked his gun.

Barik Null strolled into the killing field looking for the slayer. The Senior Partners had set him to this task. They thawed him out every thousand years or so to hunt her. Every time he was successful. Every time a young girl died. He was beginning to believe that this hunt had no honor. He stared up at the stars. He knew his home world could not be seen from this part of the galaxy. But he knew his kinsmen were near. If he stared into the night sky just right, he could see the razor sharp edges of their shields occulting the starlight above. Barik flicked his wrist. A meter long metallic blade sprang out into the night air. He looked forward to gutting the slayer and then the long thousand year sleep. That was the only time he had any happiness. In his dreams, he dreamed of finishing his hunt of the Senior Partners. In his dreams, he dreamt of hunting them and killing them all.

She arrived by herself at the killing field. Buffy had sent the alien ahead. She knew that it was hidden somewhere in the deep woods that surrounded her. Buffy focused on the world before her. She had a hard time focusing on the here and now. Only a billion years ago the Old Ones had stood on this very spot. Of course this spot was a lot smaller and part of a super content half a world away. If she focused her thoughts just right she could remember the time when none of this was here. She could remember when all of this was a frozen desert.

Her brain itched. There was a constant tug of war between herself as Queen and herself as Man. She wanted nothing more than to curl up safe in her hive surrounded by the damp heat of her drones and lay her eggs. Only, an idiot was stopping her. She knew her hive would not be safe until she eliminated the predator that threatened it and her. Something else was bothering her. There was a voice in her head. It was growing louder and more insistent. Buffy placed her balled up fists of her small pink hands to her temple as the voice broke free of her subconscious and spoke to her. She recognized the voice in her head.

"Willow?" Buffy said to herself.

"What? Did you think I would just let you eat me and walk away? You're a Queen now Buffy. You have the blood memories of everyone ever consumed by your kind." Buffy smiled.

"Lizard boy over there seems kina tough. You are going to have to get bloody on this one. This is gonna be a hard row to hoe. Ready to rock? The memory of Willow asked.

"Yes." Buffy said. "Yes I am."


	11. Chapter 11

All characters from the Buffyverse are property of Joss Whedon. The character of the Alien and the Predator belongs to 20th century Fox. Everything else belongs to me.

Giles stepped out of the car. He needed to speak to Buffy. He could see that she had her stake out. She was ready to strike at the predator. Buffy was working under the assumption that she was fighting a vampire. Giles knew better. The Predator was a blood zombie. It was a dead thing reanimated by a type of magic Buffy had never seen. If she attacked it as if it was vampire it would easily kill her.

"Buffy!" Giles yelled. The distant murky figures of Buffy and the Predator didn't move. Giles yelled again. "Buffy!" Both of them turned to look at Giles. He didn't like that.

"It's not a vampire!" He yelled. Buffy tilted her head. What was Giles talking about? "Buffy, it's a zombie! You have to cut its head off!" Buffy heard him this time. The Predator heard Giles as well. It began to move towards the watcher.

Buffy slammed into the Predator with all of her weight. She knocked it on its back. She pounded it with her fists. The first punch cracked the Predator's metal mask. The second punch shattered its jaw. Her knuckles bled. She didn't care. Giles was hers to protect.

The Predator brought an arm up and knocked Buffy off of him. He rubbed his face. He could feel the fractured bone beneath his skin. Plasma guns came to life as a fierce and terrible blackness fell on him. The Alien came from its hiding place. Its inner jaws punched into the predator. Chunks of flesh flew into the air. The Predator staggered backwards.

Its wrist claws extended. A meter of razor sharp metal stabbed into the chest of the alien. The metal hissed and melted destroyed by acid blood. The alien screamed. It grabbed the predator's neck and squeezed. The alien lifted the predator a full meter off the ground. It opened its jaws to strike a second time.

The predator's face mask had long ago fallen to the ground. Its jaws were free now. The predator screeched it blood curling challenge. Its wide double jaws showed rows of teeth eager to tear flesh. The predator activated its shoulder mounted cannon. A shell of specially constructed metal entered the gun chamber and was instantly heated to well over ten thousand degrees in a fraction of a second by blue-green lasers. A plasma ball exploded into the alien's face. It died instantly. It'd black body sunk to the ground. The predator turned to Buffy.

Eve hit the trackball on the computer. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit zoomed in on the battle in Sunnydale.

"One down one to go." Eve thought. Her fingers hovered above the activation button on her keyboard. She could unleash the atomics with a tap of a finger. She ran scenario after scenario in her head about how this might end. In far too many of them she had to nuke Sunnydale. She didn't have a problem with that.

It moved in a blink of an eye. The predator zipped across the field and bashed Buffy on the side of her face knocking her to the ground. Buffy rolled then got back to her feet. The predator hit her again. The air went out of her.

"Another hunt another dead girl." Thought Barik Null. It brought up the jagged remains of his wrist claw and impaled Buffy. He felt the metal slide into her. Her blood spurted out. Barik yanked the blade. The ragged edges of the blade tore a hole in her body from the inside out.

Buffy fell dying. Her body slowed. Her mind raced at incredible speed. She could see the all of creation as recorded by the alien blood memories. She saw the Old Ones on Earth a billion years ago. She saw the Old Ones create the alien species and mystically network them together. She saw the force behind the slayers and their true history in a blink of an eye. She knew about the Dark Men, then the Watchers, then the Guardians. She saw the scythe buried deep beneath Sunnydale and knew she didn't need it anymore. Willow asked her a question.

"So Buffy, are you ready to be strong?" She said.

"Yes." Buffy said.

"Then remember who you are. We won't need the whole spell, just the last part. The part you say." The memories of Willow insisted.

"Maus." Said Buffy as she fell. It was almost a whisper.

A flash of orange white light shot beneath her skin. The joining spell was complete. Buffy had performed it based on the memories of Willow. The spell had worked because of the mystical memories of the alien. Buffy had achieved _synthesis_. She knew who she was. She knew all the secrets.

She stuck a hand out and caught herself before she hit the ground. Buffy stood straight up. Her wounds were healed. Buffy opened her hand. A beam of red fire blasted the predator ten feet into the air. His body slammed into the ground. Half of him was burned away. Magic instantly began to rebuild his flesh.

"What the hell!" Said Manning. He'd seen Buffy light up the night with her burning crimson glow. Manning checked his gun. It was loaded. He looked at Giles. Giles looked back at him. Neither knew what to do.

Buffy floated in sea of a billion years of memory. She saw the eon slow rotation of the galaxy in a swirl of red and yellow stars. She saw the ancient home world of the Senior Partners and what it had become. She saw the big playground with its fifteen life bearing worlds. Buffy lifted her face to the stars. Under the joining spell she could easily see the predator battle ships hovering over her. She knew what they really wanted. She twisted her head slightly. She could sense the Wolfram and hart satellite orbiting above Sunnydale.

"Too late." Buffy said directly to Eve. "I am awake."

Eve hit the firing button. Beneath Sunnydale, high yield shape charges exploded. Perfect spheres of plutonium compressed under the force of the explosion. Neutrons were forced into core of the unstable atoms. They decayed releasing their nuclear energy and a hellfire on Earth.

Everything turned white. The world went away. There was nothing. Then after a moment the world returned. The atomics had exploded to no effect.

"The slayer is the avatar of a force beyond comprehension." Buffy said still speaking to Eve. Hundreds of miles away Eve jumped back from her monitor. She had just witnessed a profound act of magic.

"She did it!" Eve though. The philopispy of the Senior Partners was this; there was thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The thesis of human existence is ignorance. The antithesis is failure based on acting on that ignorance. Synthesis was transcendence. The flesh of the alien and the technology of the predator had both failed. Buffy had transcended them both.

"It's over." Eve thought. She began to shiver from fear. She could hear the angry voices of the Senior Partners calling out to her.

"Holy shit!" Said Manning more succinctly.

The Predator slowly stood. "What was this?" He thought. In the ten thousand years since the start of the long hunt this had never happened. Something in him recognized that this was the end. Some part of him was happy. He roared and lunged at Buffy in a burst of speed. His bloody blade pointed at her as he leapt. He would kill the slayer now.

"Burn." Buffy said softly. She knew the spell used by the Senior Partners. She _remembered_ it. The Predator burst into bright unnatural flames that flowered outwards into ashes. Above, a fleet of twelve predator ships decloaked. One ship nearly a quarter mile long decloaked directly above Buffy. The gun ports were open. She knew enough not to be afraid. The predators killed cowards on sight.

Behind her four predators dropped their shield. A predator with bones in his grey hair came and looked at her. He stared Buffy in the face for a long time then emitted a deep bass grunt. The predators gathered the ashes of Barik Null and took them back to the ship. Just before they became invisible, the senior predator took Barik Null's cracked facemask and tossed it to Buffy. She caught it in the air with one hand. She knew what this was. Every good predator deserved a souvenir. The old predator took one look at her, laughed then disappeared. Minutes later the predator ships were gone. They had faded into the darkness from which they came.

Manning was standing behind her. His gun was pointed at the back of her head.

"Lady, I don't know what you are. " He said. Buffy turned to face him. "But I will be damned if I am going to let another monster walk the Earth. "

"I am not a monster." Buffy said. Her voice sounded like wasp buzzing through thick molasses. Her eyes glowed orange white. "Slayers are not monsters. We have souls." Manning fired. Two shots rang out. In the air before her, the bullets changed into butterflies. "I am not to be feared." She said. "I am the memory of the living galaxy made flesh."

Giles walked up to Buffy. He needed to know what his slayer had become. "What are you?" Giles asked. "What are we to you now?"

Buffy turned her head. She could feel the lives of the billions of humans on the planet. Those lives were hers now more than ever. She felt at one with them. They were more than just flesh. They were family. Buffy answered Giles flatly. "We are Hive."


End file.
